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Having trouble installing a piece of hardware? Want to know if that peripheral is compatible with Linux?

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I am looking for a secure USB stick (flash drive), which allows me to securely transport from Linux (Ubuntu/SUSE present releases) to Windows XP/Vista or MacOS X platforms and visa versa. Typically my situation when I should give a talk, getting to the presentation laptop, plugin my USB stick and start the presentation without any hassles.

So, up to my knowledge TrueCrypt and other software in that field are not suitable for my situation, due to the fact that they need admin passwords, or even TrueCrypt installed on the particular platform. This is normally out of scope in these situations.

I think you are asking for the impossible here, at least as far as I am aware.

You are talking about an encrypted volume that can be read on any operating system, without installing any additional software or doing any setup beyond plugging it in.

Any encrypted filesystem is going to need some sort of software to be installed and configured on the host operating system. Anything that doesn't is probably some silly little trick like hiding the partition until you enter in a password on some app that lives on the stick.

You could do a loop-back encrypted filesystem on the flash drive which would work out of the box on Linux and Mac OS, but obviously not Windows. Alternately, any of the "secure" flash drives will require some Windows software to either be installed, or at least run from the drive itself. The IronKey, for example, is completely dependent on it's XP/Vista software, and won't do anything on any other OS (though they say a Linux/Mac client is in the works).